Building brand awareness is an essential step for companies that are trying to make a name for themselves. With more people spending time online, it would be wise to include digital advertising into your overall brand building strategy. But how to do it right?

In this article, SmartyAds will uncover the Top Five Proven Strategies that will help you increase your brand awareness and promote your business online.

Secret Strategy #1: Use a variety of programmatic buying options!

Digital advertising offers marketers a variety of media buying options. The most common way to buy online ads is through real-time bidding. With RTB auctions, you can easily access all kinds of publishers worldwide with all types of inventory and all sorts of audiences. To do this, you need to plug into an Ad Exchange and start buying ads on a per-impression basis. This type of digital media buying is great for increasing brand awareness because you can get global exposure at a very low price.

Alternatively, if you know your target audience well and have an idea where to find it, you may join a Private Marketplace (PMP). It is an invitation-only exchange with reliable publishers and premium audiences. In this case, you get more control of the process, as you will always know where your ads appear.

Finally, there are direct buys, which allow establishing personal contacts with media owners. Programmatic direct provides a brand-safe environment and allows purchasing exclusive inventory at pre-negotiated prices. Costs may vary, but typically much higher, compared to real-time bidding.

If your goal is to enhance brand recognition, Real-Time Bidding is your best option. However, SmartyAds would advise allocating 20% of your budget for private marketplace deals and around 10% of your budget for direct buys.

In this scenario, you will get most of the programmatic!

Secret Strategy #2: Advertise on different marketing channels!

Your potential customers can be everywhere. For example, they may use computers at work, smartphones while they commute and tablets or smart TVs when they’re at home. When it comes to building brand awareness, you need to consider cross-device and cross-channel marketing.

In order to deliver a powerful brand message to prospective clients, you have to understand your consumer’s journey. Track the customer experience across all touchpoints and map out the ideal path that leads them to product acquisition. Programmatic advertising allows you to reach target audiences across devices, channels, platforms, and operating systems. Experiment with different channels to find out what works best for your brand.

Focus on mobile advertising, since smartphone ownership is growing fast these days. In order to spread the word about your brand at a global scale, take into account in-game, in-app and mobile web advertising.

Secret Strategy #3: Use creative ad formats!

The first encounter with a brand is always important because it defines the future relationship between you and your clients. In order to make a positive impression, you have to be creative and stand out from the crowd. How can you achieve that? By choosing top-performing ad formats, of course. Digital advertising offers various ad formats, ad creative types and ad units that will help to tell your brand’s story, build trust and create a strong emotional bond with future customers.

Banner ads are the most beneficial for raising brand awareness and remarketing past visitors. Display ads can incorporate your brand’s logo, colors, fonts, images, text, and even animation. The success of your banner ad totally depends on you. So make sure you create an eye-catching advertisement that would resonate with your audience and make them curious about your brand.

What are the alternatives? If you are very ambitious and ready to spend more dollars, go for interactive ad formats. Rich media, expandable banners, interstitials, interactive banners, and video ads receive positive feedback from the audience. These formats provide entertaining elements and allow users to engage with the ad.

Mind that general display ads are more budget-friendly (on average $1.90 per 1.000 impressions) compared to video ads (up to $27.61 per 1.000 impressions).

Best-performing banner sizes: medium rectangle (300x250), large rectangle (336x280), leaderboard (728x90), half page banner (300x600) and large mobile banner (320x100).

SmartyAds recommends opting for NATIVE ads, because they are highly relevant and are not intrusive, which is crucial for a successful brand building (learn more about our native advertising solution).

Secret Strategy #4: Use Your Data to the Fullest!

It comes as no surprise that data is the king in the digital advertising world. In order to launch a successful brand awareness campaign, you need to gather all the data you have, analyze it and draw actionable insights that will help to shape your strategy.

Targeting. Think about your existing customers. Who are they? What do they do? What are their fears and passions? Based on these characteristics, create a detailed portrait of your potential clients. This data will be then used for targeting settings. With programmatic advertising, you can segment and target audiences according to the following criteria:

  • demographic (age, gender, wage, education);
  • geographic (country, city, zip code, climate);
  • psychographic (interests, lifestyle, values);
  • behavioral (browsing history);
  • location (proximity marketing);
  • dayparting (morning, noon, night);

Performance. When running a brand awareness campaign it is important to track everything that’s happening. Programmatic advertising offers granular statistics and real-time reports on click-through rate, viewability, traffic and engagement rates. Use this data to understand which placements work best for your brand and which audiences are more responsive.

Campaign optimization. After the first stage of your brand building campaign, take your time to reflect. Use big data analytics tools to predict possible outcomes of the next steps. When knowing what works and what doesn't, you’ll be able to allocate your marketing budget more effectively within media channels.

Use the following metrics to measure the effectiveness of your brand awareness campaign:

  • Impressions
  • Click-Through Rate (CTR)
  • Reach and Frequency

Secret Strategy #5: Focus on viewable advertising!

When you want to boost brand awareness, you need to show your brand to as many people as possible. Ideally, those people would be your prospective clients. The story is simple – people see your brand, they trust it, they like it, they memorize it. However, with programmatic advertising things are a bit more sophisticated. How do you make sure ads that you’ve paid for were actually seen by people?

The problem is partly solved by the ad viewability metric. It helps to track the number of ad impressions that were viewed by people, rather than the number of impressions that were merely served. Choose the viewable CPM bidding model (vCPM) and pay for each time the ad is seen by the user. This way, you can always calculate how many users were exposed to your brand and how long they interacted with the ad.

An impression is counted as “viewable” when at least 50% of it is visible to the user for at least more than one second.

These were the top five tactics for better brand recognition with programmatic advertising. Ready to launch your brand awareness campaign online? Looking for a programmatic technology partner that will back you up 24/7?

We’ve been on the market for a while and we know how things work. Contact us at support@smartyads.com and get more information on how to empower your brand online.